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6 - Darwin and Taxonomy
- Edited by Michael Ruse, Florida State University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 28 February 2013, pp 72-79
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- Chapter
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Summary
Charles Darwin was born into a world in which taxonomy was already the established scientific language for expressing the diversity of life. In Europe and its colonies around the world, a growing community of museum workers, wealthy collectors, and avid hobbyists named and classified kinds of plants and animals numbering in the tens of thousands, a number that was increasing at a dizzying rate (Farber 2000). As a boy, Darwin absorbed samples of this community’s output, using taxonomists’ names for flowers in his father’s garden and for birds shot for sport; in his university years, he began to interact with taxonomists. Years later, he recollected those carefree days:
But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.
… No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.”
(Darwin 1958a, 62–63)Childish though Darwin’s collecting hobby seemed to him later, it meant that as an undergraduate he was familiar with current taxonomic ideas and practices; without this familiarity, Professor Henslow would not have recommended him for the Beagle voyage.